'It could have been any summer evening, but of course it wasn't.
It was the end of some things, the beginning of so many others.
'Nick Wheatley has finished high school, but he isn't ready for the rest of his life. His parents are getting divorced, his sister is downright weird and his best friend and neighbour, Marion, seems to have acquired a boyfriend.
'One hot night, Marion's father is killed in a hit-and-run. There are no suspects and no leads. But a sly tip from the local psychic sends Nick and Marion into the undertow of a strange and sinister world they hadn't known existed in the suburbs - one of inscrutable gangsters, speed-dealing bikies and unpredictable, one-eyed conspiracy theorists.
'It's a world they'll be lucky to survive.' (Publication summary)
'A suburban crime thriller with darkly humorous undertones.'
'Chris Womersley’s Ordinary Gods and Monsters is a hybrid novel made with familiar parts. It’s a new iteration of Womersley’s suburban Aussie nostalgia found in his earlier novels, The Diplomat (2019) and Cario (2013), and interspersed through his collected short fiction, but this time the stage is an unnamed Australian town with a tight-knit and thinly veiled criminal underworld. The novel operates comfortably within conventions, deploying several familiar narrative elements (an abusive alcoholic father, a drug-dealing underbelly, self-absorbed and wayward teen narrator, a mysterious death) to create a coming-of-age story with shades of crime fiction.' (Introduction)
'Remember the Shakespeare you had to read in high school? Did you love it or hate it, or sit somewhere in between? Personally speaking, I’m Macbeth and a heart emoji. I suspect when the teenage Chris Womersley read Romeo and Juliet, he underscored Mercutio’s exasperated cry, “A plague o’ both your houses!”' (Introduction)
'In his essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud observed that fiction writers have an unusual privilege in setting the terms of the real, what he called a ‘peculiarly directive power’: ‘by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions’, and ‘often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material’.' (Introduction)
'In his essay on the uncanny, Sigmund Freud observed that fiction writers have an unusual privilege in setting the terms of the real, what he called a ‘peculiarly directive power’: ‘by means of the moods he can put us into, he is able to guide the current of our emotions’, and ‘often obtains a great variety of effects from the same material’.' (Introduction)
'Remember the Shakespeare you had to read in high school? Did you love it or hate it, or sit somewhere in between? Personally speaking, I’m Macbeth and a heart emoji. I suspect when the teenage Chris Womersley read Romeo and Juliet, he underscored Mercutio’s exasperated cry, “A plague o’ both your houses!”' (Introduction)
'Chris Womersley’s Ordinary Gods and Monsters is a hybrid novel made with familiar parts. It’s a new iteration of Womersley’s suburban Aussie nostalgia found in his earlier novels, The Diplomat (2019) and Cario (2013), and interspersed through his collected short fiction, but this time the stage is an unnamed Australian town with a tight-knit and thinly veiled criminal underworld. The novel operates comfortably within conventions, deploying several familiar narrative elements (an abusive alcoholic father, a drug-dealing underbelly, self-absorbed and wayward teen narrator, a mysterious death) to create a coming-of-age story with shades of crime fiction.' (Introduction)
'A suburban crime thriller with darkly humorous undertones.'
